Ironman and Urdu

I made a beeline for Ironman today. How could I not? It stars Robert Downey Jr., it promised much action, and some very respectable but fun professor colleagues of mine were raving about it it at an academic party last night. Plus, I have a 13-year-old boy as an excuse and we pride ourselves on being film buffs and critics.

So, we went to see it at Cinerama, no less. After settling into really good seats, I almost fell out of mine within 10 minutes into the movie. The people on the screen were speaking Urdu! It’s a language I know and love. It’s the language in which I best enjoy poetry and song. It’s the tongue that has enriched India’s linguistic landscape.

At first, I was reading the subtitles. Then, realizing they were distracting and hugely incorrect in their translations, I stopped. Here’s another thing that made me stop : in the film, Urdu was the language of “the bad guys.” The words were of hatred and terror. The dialogue was echoing in the theater as a cinematic technique to create dread. It carried none of the pleasure and lyricism with which I associate the language and the people whom I have heard speak it.

I was so torn. Here I was, in happy celebration of the power of Hollywood to make my Sunday. And, here I was, powerless to make the language glorious to the audience, powerless to tell them that they should also listen to it in a song sometime. So, I am not opposed to the “authenticity” of using Urdu/Farsi/Pashtun when we are watching people from that region of the world. But, as I go back to teaching my course in “International Cinema and Culture” this Thursday, I will talk a little about occasionally letting people from those parts of the world play roles other than those of terrorists.